While some guys just trying to build their 400 megapixel cameras with some cheap scanner bough on eBay plus some old 8×10 camera, two young Hungarian build their own, working, 400 megapixel camera. Although the new innovation costs a bit more than $250, it works perfectly and applicable to take aeriel photos from a moving airplane with an amazing 0.5 centimeter per pixel resolution.

Gabor Bako and Zsolt Molnar, who become well known with their world record 70 gigapixel panoramic photo of the Hungarian capital in 2010, started to build their own, high-resolution camera system 6 years ago. During the years four version of the camera was built while they reached the final prototype. Besides the three visible channels (red, green and blug, RGB) the device is ablte to take pictures on 13 other channels, that covers a spectrum invisible for the human eye so the equipment is suitable for scientific use.

Their first successful work was a high resolution aerial photo of Budapest Zoo in 2009 that shows the park in a maximum of 1.8cm/pixel resolution full screen view. Although they used a previous prototype of the camera, at the time of creation it was the most detailed aerial mosaic with 11 times higher resolution than Google Maps. “We used a really sow airplane with a great hole on the bottom to implement the camera. It was an earlier version with a lot of cable and we were vorrying about the camera will stop” – said one of them. “Sometimes the air temperature was -30 celsius and we were flying 4-6 hours”.